Because Huck tells his story himself, the stylistic richness is immeasurably
deepened by the rhythms, intonations, and choice of words of this magnificent
child. Frank Baldanza, Mark Twain, 1961

His fresh handling of the materials and techniques of backwoods story-tellers
is the clearest example in our history of the adaptation of a folk art
to serious literary uses.Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain, 1963

Mark Twain, in short, who as a personality could not help but be a humorist,
as a literary artist whose works were channeled by such currents, could
not help but be an American humorist. His works are, in a sense, a summary
of nineteenth-century native American humor. Walter Blair, Mark Twain
and Huck Finn, 1960

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book, rare in our literature,
which manages to suggest the lovely possibilities of life in America without
neglecting its terrors. Leo Marx, "Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and
Huckleberry Finn," 1953

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of those rare books which
are at once acceptable to the intelligentsia and to that celebrated American
phenomenon, the average citizen; it is a book which even anti-literary
children read and enjoy. Even if the language of the book should eventually
be lost or, worse still, replaced by convenient abridgements, the memory
of Huck Finn would still survive among us like some old and indestructible
god. James M. Cox, "Remarks on the Sad Initiation of Huckleberry
Finn," 1955

I think he mainly misses fire. I think his life misses fire; he might
have been something; but he never arrives. Walt Whitman in Mark Twain's
Huckleberry Finn, 1959

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is
stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.
But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that.
There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. Ernest
Hemingway, in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, 1959

Huck Finn is alone: there is no more solitary character in fiction.
The fact that he has a father only emphasizes his loneliness; and he views
his father with a terrifying detachment. So we come to see Huck himself
in the end as one of the permanent symbolic figures of fiction; not unworthy
to take a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet and
other great discoveries that man has made about himself. T. S. Eliot,
in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, 1959

In one sense, Huckleberry Finn seems a circular book, ending as
it began with a refused adoption and a projected flight; and
certainly it has the effect of refusing the reader's imagination
passage into the future. But there is a break-through in the last
pages, especially in the terrible sentence which begins, "But I
reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest...."
In
these words, the end of childhood is clearly signaled; and we are forced
to ask the question, which, duplicitously, the book refuses to answer:
what will become of Huck if he persists in his refusal to return to the
place where he has been before? Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in
the American Novel, 1982